A Quick Update

Family and Friends,

Day 189 of our Haiti Adventure!

The pace of life is beginning to pick up as we prepare for a big mission team to come and then our departure to the US in two weeks. The team will be here on May 24th, and we will leave with most of them on the 30th, arriving in Sioux Center on the night of the 31st. We know that once they arrive (all 27 of them!) everything will be a blur of activity until we go, so we are trying to do a few things now ahead of time to get ready.

This morning Patchouko and I were transferring a pile of wood to a different location, and as we began to turn over the last few boards the critters went scurrying. The kids all came over and watched the action. We killed one giant full-grown tarantula, three scorpions, countless cockroaches, several frogs, several crickets, a dozen or more spiders, and we just let the numerous lizards run away. Luckily there weren’t any rats.

Unfortunately the new orphanage compound will not be ready for the kids and staff to move in before we leave for America. This means we will not be able to move into the old orphanage house before we go. This is not a huge setback, however, because teams will be here this summer who can help with that transition while we are gone and out of the way. This fall we plan to have the house more accessible, including installing a real toilet and our own stove and freezer. It will take awhile to get used to the orphanage kids being in a different compound, but it will be a little more relaxing for our family. We can go over and see them next door any time we want.

We have declared this week our final full week of home school with our kids. We will continue with some activities this summer to keep them fresh, but we will scale it down. The first year went really well for us, probably better than we could have hoped for. Lynn is anxious to order the materials for this fall and see what we get to do next.

Everyone is pretty healthy here now. The kids had been battling colds, as strange as that sounds considering the climate in which we live, but today they feel better. I (Cory) have been feeling really good lately and have been able to do a lot more hard work and hiking. Lynn has pretty much been healthy the whole time we have been here. Cholera has continued to be scarce in the village, which is a real answer to prayer.

Pam gave us a project to try to gather the last couple hundred school sponsor photos. As you probably are aware, Mission Haiti sponsors about 1,500 students for school each year. Another way to say it is individual donors pay to sponsor these children through Mission Haiti. Each year each kid needs their tuition paid, their backpack and shoes to be distributed, their medications, and their photo taken. A professional photographer was here a couple of months ago to get the bulk of the photos, but it is impossible to get every one because a large portion of students are absent on any given day, and we probably sponsor kids in about 30-40 schools now. So there are a couple of hundred kids we need to track down, wherever they are. We have done a little more than half of those at this point, and we are still working.

One adventure we had while collecting these pictures occurred just this last Friday. Patchouko was busy doing some painting, so I asked Chelo to go with me up the mountains to some schools. We were going to some schools where neither of us had ever been before, and even Pam hasn’t been to these. We hopped on the motorcylce and headed up the highway that goes over the mountains.

At the top there is a village called Mason, and we stopped at a couple of schools there where we have sponsor children. That went pretty well, although not all the kids were there that day who needed pictures taken. Pretty typical stuff. From there we were looking for a school in a village called Debuchet. From the main road they told us, “Just head down this dirt side road and you will get there pretty soon.” In Haiti “pretty soon” might mean an hour.

We did go down that road long enough to start wondering if we were approaching the ends of the Earth. Each time we stopped to ask about the school someone would tell us, “Just a little bit further.” My gas gauge was already below “E”, but we could hear a little bit more sloshing around in the tank. Finally we found the school, and of course the four students we needed were absent that day. Bummer. We headed back to the main road just in time to buy some gas and head home.

We'll keep you updated as our first term in Haiti draws to a close and as we head back to the States to visit family, friends, and supporting churches.  It will be interesting to note our feelings as we return to the culture in which we grow up and see it again for the first time.  Alexandra already confessed that she is nervous about using a regular toilet, because she doesn't remember how to flush it.  We assured her it will all come back to her when the time comes.

May God Bless Your Adventure Today!
-The Grimm Family Adventurers